Slave
Labor in Nazi, Germany, Camps

B-C

Babiy Yar, Kiev, Ukraine (of
course the Ukrainians were blamed for this)
"On September 19, 1941 the Fascist troops occupied Kiev, and in 10 days, on September,
29 they started to shoot civilians in Babiy Yar. According to German documents,
in two days 33,771 Jews were killed. The ravine was turned into a burial place
of Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Czechs, Gypsies, prisoners of war,
patriots, mentally handicapped and ill people. The Nazi did not even spare children,
old people, pregnant women. According to historical data, over 100,000 people
were interred on the lands adjoining Babiy Yar. Some of victims were buried alive." For more info:http://www.kiev.info/culture/babiy_yar.htm
KZ Bad Gandersheimhttp://www.gandersheim-city.de/

Berga Concentration Camp

Berga an der Elster is in the Greiz district
of the state of Thuringia, Germany. In World War 2 it was a sub-camp of Buchenwald. It
was also was used as a sub-camp for Stalag IX-B, which was, nominally at
least, an ordinary German military prisoner-of-war camp. However, many American
Jewish prisoners of war were sent there, and it had a reputation for being
an appalling camp. The camp's code name was Schwalbe
V.

In World War II a slave
labor camp called "Berga
an der Elster"[2] was
operated here to dig 17 tunnels for an underground ammunition factory.
Workers were supplied by Buchenwald concentration
camp , and from a POW
camp, Stalag IX-B . The latter
was in contravention of the provisions of the Third Geneva Convention.

Many prisoners died as a result of malnutrition, sickness
(including pulmonary disease due to dust inhalation from tunnelling
with explosives) and beatings, including
73

The
labor camp formed part of Germany's secret plan to transform, via hydrogenation,
brown coal into usable fuel for tanks, planes, and other military machinery.
However, the camp's additional purpose was Vernichtung
durch Arbeit (or "extermination through labor,
and prisoners were intentionally worked to death through inhumane working
and living conditions and starvation. This secondary purpose of extermination
was carried out up till the end of the war, when the prisoners were put
on a forced death march to keep ahead of the advancing allied forces.

Berga was run by a fanatical German national guard sergeant
named Erwin Metz, who was responsible for the inhumane conditions and who
gave the order to take the prisoners on the death march. When the allied
forces closed in on the retreating Germans, Metz deserted his post and
attempted to escape by bicycle, fearing the consequences of being captured
in possession of the remaining Berga prisoners and having to answer for
his war crimes. Still, he was captured days after the prisoners were liberated
by American forces and was sentenced to death.

However, due to the American
political climate and the war department's shifting priorities towards
defending against the Soviets in the lead up to the Cold War, many German
war criminals' sentences were commuted in exchange for intelligence that
the Western allies believed to could be used against the Soviets. Metz
was therefore only imprisoned for 5 years before being released back
to Germany a free man.

I have to tell you that we work on a book about the camp in Bocholt and we are always searching for photos for the book. Publishing date somewhere in 2014. The camp doesn't exist anymore. Now it is a forrest.

The first Emsland camp opened in June 1933 and was marked by especially brutal conditions.
In April 1934, the facility was changed into a prison camp for criminals, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), and those condemned for high treason.
In September 1944, 400 Night and Fog prisoners (western European resistance fighters) were deported to these camps.

Wendish Riettz - is a municipality in the Oder-Spree district, in Brandenburg, Germany.

The history of this village at the bottom end of the Scharmützelsee lake about an hour from Berlin is all there in the name. The Wends were West Slavs, who settled in the land between the Elbe and the Oder rivers over a thousand years ago. Divided into a number of different tribes, they were the majority population of the area that now makes up most of the state of Brandenburg until the arrival of German colonists between the 12th and the 14th centuries. By the 18th Century most of the Wends had been assimilated into the German population, except for the Sorbs, who continue to live as Germany’s only indigenous minority in the Spreewald region, not far from Wendisch-Rietz.

Who knows how many people in this holiday town have Slavic roots, although the Nazis didn’t like the idea and changed the name of the town to Märkisch Rietz until it was reverted back in 1945. From then until 1990, the little town at the bottom of the lake was part of the German Democratic Republic, and there are traces of the socialist period still to be discovered to this day.

packed together, from September, 1941 by collective transports
to the destruction camps eastwards.
About the stupefying destiny of a group of Brunswick Jews reports an
eyewitness who was official-obliged till the end of 1944 in a coal hydrier
factory close to sweating out as a department manager:
' On the food maps there were sometimes the special allocations, soap
or such a thing which were delivered on call. Because I could not perceive
them because of my service, I announced myself in 1943 to Brunswick,
so that my relatives could come to enjoy special allocations.
To the notification of change of address I proceeded in the police station
in the Celler street/corner ring. When the official saw that I announceed
departure from Heydebreck (near Auschwitz), he looked at me suddenly
quite anxiously and said: ' There I have also been. ' I said: ' Nevertheless,
you have not hopefully brought the last Brunswick Jews after sweating
out?! ' There he caught in to howl. If they introduce themselves, a police
officer! But he was an auxiliary policeman and apparently very devoutly.
' The man's God may forgive me ', he said, ' I do not get over it '.
I asked: ' What has happened then? Was this the train from which the
Jews have waved out and where the SS to those has the bones destroyed
? ' - This had happened because the Jews thirst and had asked for water.

This policeman had accompanied the Jew's transports from Brunswick as
a marking person; to Berlin everything has been quiet, but the Berlin
Jews who have got on would have known where it went. Then this would
have become a dreadful journey to sweating out.

I asked: ' What has become then from them? ' and he said: ' They have
been gasified everything, everything are away '. (Interview with H.Sommer
, in 1981)
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But also during the following years the Nazi rule and the war begun by
her demanded thousands of human lives. Under in the prison in Wolfenbüttel of executed are many victims of the National Socialist arbitrariness
justice and war justice. Numerous foreign members of the resistance also
belonged to the executed. On the area of the Army of the Reich in Salzgitter 3400 foreign prisoners of war, prisoners and foreign workers died. 138
of them were executed. On the Brunswick foreign cemetery in the Brodweg there lie anonymously foreign forced laborers and prisoner of war. Also
on the old Catholic cemetery in Hochstrasse Polish forced laborers are
buried anonymously. Forty air raids on Brunswick took 2900 bomb victims.
The city had to deplore to 5244 favour.
On the main cemetery graves and memorials remind us of these events.
' Are watchful - with it our death in vain was not ' is the inscription
of a stone tablet of the Rieseberger victims, urns in 1953 on the Brunswick
cemetery would cross have become. An honourary grove reminds of the dead
people.
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CONCENTRATION CAMP: ' Example: SCHILL monument, Schillstreet '

By the rearrangement of the industry to complete armament production
and for construction work or clearing work outside camps of the concentration
camps were moved in the factories themselves. The NS terror was exercised
here, often under the eyes of the population and under their co-operation,
after the principle of the exploitation of the human worker and the destruction.
In the city borders of Brunswick there were as can be proved four outside
commands of concentration storage:

To the backup of the agricultural products and as a substitute with missing
industrial workers about eight millions foreign manpower ('civil
worker', 'forced laborer' and prisoner of war) were used in the ' Large-scale
German empire '. From the numerous camps also in Braunscheig some tracks
have still been preserved till this day and serve, among the rest, the
accommodation of late emigrants, how in Griegstreet. In particular the
Brunswick Büssing
works (later MAN) used the possibilities of the application of forced
laborers fully. Of it the following camps are known:
· camp Mascherode, Salzdahlumer street/corner Griegstreet (approx. 1200
persons);
· several camps in Kralenriede (Rühmer Berg, Steinriedendamm, Schuntersiedlung,
approx. 2000 persons).
All together nearly 50 'civil worker camps' existed
at Brunswick companies for foreign forced laborers. Biggest from them
were:

· the communal camps of several companies in the Frankfurt
street and on the Schützenplace,
· the camps Kälberwiese and Baumschule Lehndorf of the MIAG and
· the camp of the optical works Voigtländer and son in the Berlin
street.

In the following big 'civil worker storage' were accommodated with
end of the war between 400 and 1800 foreign forced laborers:

About the inhuman conditions of foreign workers and prisoners of war
gives the report of inhabitant's of Brunswick information whose parents
helped these people in their misery, although this was prohibited by
law:

' With us on the street were done to construction work by prisoners
of war. They were hard guarded. If somebody went past with them, they
whispered ' bread! Bread! '. They suffered hunger. Although we also
had enough hunger, then my mother tried to help them. Of course nobody
might see this, because one might not help prisoner, talk not even
to them. My mother made it completely ingenious: She cut breads, it
wrapped and took them with on the way to the shopping. In the meantime,
with a prisoner she had taken up eye contact. Blinked them to, took
the muffled bread and threw it in one in that standing garbage metric
ton sews. There the prisoner knew give and could get later the breads.
Against the fact that the prisoners examined the garbage metric tons
after comestibles the guards had nothing.

My father co-operated in a company important to war in the city with Ukrainian foreign workers,
partly were the 14-year-old children whom one supplied not properly.

There was all food on stamps during the war. Thus the possibility was
to be helped, very much restricted. Only with the meat trader there was
sometimes quite awful mussel meat, undefinable stuff. My father ate it,
and he took it in the cooking dishes with in the company for
the Ukrainian youngsters. Also this had to happen secretly.
'

Kdo. (Kommando) Dachau, Zivilarbeiterlager (Civil
work camp); US zone
2 miles S of Gelting, 3 miles east of NeufahrnLager Buchberg, worked with armament industry*, from 1940-45 600
workers, partly POW, partly civilian; write to mayor in Gelting

*Probably the armament plant, DSC, was situated in the fir forest of Foehrenwald,
within the triangle of Wolfrathausen, Gelting, and Neufahrn;

CC Kdo Dachau had a smaller Kommando in the factory named SS Arbeiterlager (work
camp) Neufarn

Buchenwald

"I want to bow to my father, Andriy Andriyovych
Yushchenko, for the lessons he taught me. He was a teacher in the small
village of Khoruzhivka, in Sumy Region. He also was a prisoner in Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald. My
father's truth has led me through life to the high honour of becoming the
leader of my country," from inauguration speech of Ukrainian
President Viktor Yushchenko, January 23, 2005.

------------------------

"My father never met a guard he would forgive. They were brutal men
who beat him and killed his friends for no reason. One sub-zero winter
night, these guards ran roll calls over and over. Hundreds of prisoners in pajama
thin clothes stood outside in the cold and snow. By morning, about a
hundred prisoners were dead," by John Guzlowski. "When
my father was dying in a hospice, there were times when he was sure that the
doctors and the nurses were the guards who beat him when he was a prisoner in
the concentration camp. There were also times when he couldn’t recognize
me. He looked at me and was frightened, as if I were one of the guards."

From 1939 to 1945, it was the prisoner of war camp for officers Oflag IV
C. The events are documented in the Fluchtmuseum (escape museum). The museum
is open to visitors for history and a guided tour of the castle. It's best
to phone the castle administration before coming. In this way one best can
learn, why every schoolchild in England knows about Colditz castle.

A well-known Jewish camp on Cyprus. The exodus of
Jews from Europe to the Promised Land was thwarted by Great Britain, which
blockaded the shores of Palestine to prevent thousands of Jews from entering
the ountry. In August 1946 Great Britain's foreign minister, Ernest Bevin,
ordered that boats of migrants be intercepted and escorted to the island
of Cyprus, where the "illegal" Jews were placed in internment camps. The
American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was allowed to enter the camps
and provide residents with aid and relief. From Displaced Persons Camp Money by Frank Passic and Steven A. Feller.

British authorities approved the use of internal money as payment to residents who worked within the camps.